Identifying and Advocating Best Practices in the Criminal Justice System. A Texas-Centric Examination of Current Conditions, Reform Initiatives, and Emerging Issues with a Special Emphasis on Capital Punishment.

Friday, 11 January 2013

Texas Arson Conviction Reviews

Breakthroughs take time in criminal justice reform, and they get messy, but they are no less impressive when they happen.

Just
this week in Houston, the state fire marshal’s office sat down with
outside experts to pore over a short list of old arson cases suspected
of using junk science to put someone behind bars. One of those suspect
cases, from the Central Texas town of Hewitt, is on a separate review
track in McLennan County. The district attorney there has cited “serious
and complex issues” involving arson forensics in the murder conviction
of Ed Graf, who will get a hearing Friday on a writ to reopen his
26-year-old case.

All this traces back to the noisy early days of
the Texas Forensic Science Commission and its first case, the
arson-murder conviction of Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in 2004.
Critics were prone to calling reformers out of bounds, grandstanders who
were out to undermine Texans’ support of the death penalty.

Those
critics need to take a look today. The fight was a righteous one and
has yielded a kind of systematic re-examination of the science in arson
convictions that is unprecedented in the nation.

As a fledgling
agency, the Forensic Science Commission took heat for stretching its
authority in 2008 and accepting the Willingham case for review. This
newspaper is glad it did, even though the law creating the commission
didn’t expressly list arson as a forensic science under its purview.

A Texas judge is expected to consider Friday whether to grant a new
trial for a man serving a life sentence for murdering his two stepsons
by arson, or even to declare him innocent.

Ed Graf, 60, was convicted in 1988 of locking his 8- and 9-year-old
stepsons in a backyard storage shed in Hewitt, Texas, just outside Waco,
and setting the shed afire.

Graf’s is among a handful of arson cases under review by the
Lubbock-based Innocence Project of Texas and an expert state fire panel,
an unprecedented investigation of closed cases recommended by the
state’s Forensic Science Commission. The expert panel includes the
leader of the science commission.

Earlier this week, the officials brought their findings to the fire
panel assembled by Texas Fire Marshal Chris Connealy in Houston.

The panel convened after a report last year
by the Forensic Science Commission found that unreliable science helped
lead to Cameron Todd Willingham's conviction for murder by arson in
1992. Willingham, 24, had been convicted in the deaths of his three
children in a 1991 fire at their home in Corsicana, about 55 miles south
of Dallas, and was executed in 2004.

Last year’s science commission report did not draw conclusions about
Willingham's guilt, instead recommending the arson review currently
underway.

Innocence Project staff found about 30 problematic arson cases they
want to investigate, and brought them to the six-member state fire panel
when it met for the first time Tuesday.

One case involved weak evidence about how a house fire started.
Another concerned questionable arson evidence from a fire in the 1980s
in Pasadena, about 15 miles east of Houston. The person convicted in the
latter case is serving a 75-year sentence.

Connealy, a former fire chief working in the field since 1978, said
the expert panel reviewed five questionable cases, including Graf’s. He
declined to identify the other cases, since he said the panel had yet to
notify the officials who originally handled them.

Two of the nation’s leading fire science experts are scheduled to
come to Waco next month for a hearing that will help decide the fate of a
Hewitt man who claims he was wrongfully convicted of arson murder.

But the hearing could have implications far beyond Ed Graf’s case,
said Jeff Blackburn, chief counsel for the Innocence Project of Texas.He
said the state’s criminal justice system is starting to come to terms
with the idea that junk science contributed to a number of wrongful
convictions in recent decades.

But the state’s highest criminal court has not yet developed a uniform and fair way of handling such injustice, he said.

The hearing in Graf’s case, scheduled for Jan. 11, will be the first
post-conviction hearing in Texas where attorneys will present evidence
to show faulty fire science was used to secure an arson conviction,
Blackburn said.

If he and Waco attorney Walter M. Reaves Jr. are able to provide the
level of proof they think they can, Graf’s case could well be the one
that finally causes the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to set a
precedent that offers appropriate relief to people ensnared by bad
science, he said.

“The law in this area is complicated and generally terrible, but the
facts of Ed Graf’s case are not,” Blackburn said. “It shows the stark
possibilities of the way science can be misused and abused in a
courtroom. The guy shouldn’t have been convicted and deserves a new
trial.”

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The StandDown Texas Project

The StandDown Texas Project was organized in 2000 to advocate a moratorium on executions and a state-sponsored review of Texas' application of the death penalty.
To stand down is to go off duty temporarily, especially to review safety procedures.

Steve Hall

Project Director Steve Hall was chief of staff to the Attorney General of Texas from 1983-1991; he was an administrator of the Texas Resource Center from 1993-1995. He has worked for the U.S. Congress and several Texas legislators. Hall is a former journalist.